Is It All In My Head? Dissociation v Reality

Dissociation, like depression, has a wardrobe full of different outfits.

It can appear smoothly, draped in a fine mist of white muslin, allowing a hazy, overexposed world to blur before your eyes.

Other times it can rock up dressed in an altogether more jazzy little number, a more textured material with large purpley grey blotches which grow and intensify as you look at them.

Occasionally it can make quite a dramatic entrance wearing a dark, kaleidoscopic cloak which wraps around the edges of your eyes, warping distance, making things zoom in and out. Making the world a computer game. Those cars racing you... they're not real... Nothing is really real.

Sometimes dissociation involves sound... an indistinct blurring of a voice with the silence of the space it falls into... The words take a sudden dive before they reach your ears... Sometimes the letter blends that make up the words don't even get to you in the right order. Syllables stretch into each other, yawning languidly into each others' beginnings and endings and beginnings until there are no gaps in sound, just distant, fluctuating tones.

And then there are things that I fail to understand.

I ALWAYS thought I had an atrocious memory. I remember so very little about being young. Whole trips, events, months, years don't exist in my mind. Somewhere in me lies a terror filled conviction that I am in the early stages of Alzheimer's... Early onset... It seems an inescapable fate, given that it's both my long and short term memory that is an issue.

I often run upstairs to get something and by the time I'm up there, it's gone... I have conversations and stop mid sentence, unable to complete what I've been saying.

I go to ask my boss something, tap on the door, say hello and then.... then nothing. (And NO, I'm not anxious around my boss. We're good friends).

Recently, my family recalled a trip to a cousin's christening. We'd stayed the night before in a pub and I had apparently become hysterical with fear upon entering the place. Something about some drunk men in the bar...

"You must remember! You were about eleven! I was only six and I remember it!"

The nerves in my leg have all gone dead and though I watch the skin dent under their fingertips, I can't feel them pressing down on it.

That's what listening to stories of my childhood is sometimes like.

According to the woman, and to others who seem to know, my memory loss is dissociation. It's indicative of 'something'. It 'says a lot'. Really? I can't believe this. It's sounding too strange and I know, after all, that I just have a terrible memory compared to my sisters.

But I don't remember a lot of sessions either. Whole therapy sessions aren't there the next day. Someone pointed out that I pay too much to be forgetting everything. Hence my new resolve to write, despite resistance.

This post is too long but I wanted to include a song by a man I'm sure I could love (if only for his voice).

It's called In My Head and it's a question that tortures me.

Something sometimes happens in therapy where I find myself asking if anything I feel really exists... I suddenly doubt that the pain and the desperation is real... I doubt that I am even telling he truth... I don't know whether anything I feel exists in reality. I beg the woman to consider that I might be making it up... that it might all be in my head. I don't want to waste her time. I don't want her to believe me if my feelings aren't even real.

I'll leave Mr Sean Mullins to explain the rest.

Three Elements Of Therapy

3 things that feature in every therapy session I have:



1. We follow thought ropes which very suddenly get chopped by an immense, invisible axe.

Typical scenario = Therapist says something which suddenly strikes me
Me = "Yeah! That's true..! I remember this one time..."
CHOP
Silence. My mind is blank and I have no recollection of what I
was about to say. My mind has emptied, my ears are ringing and
when I speak again, I am accutely aware of how loud I am speaking
and the fact that I feel like I'm slurring my words like a drunk.
T = "Your mind fragmented just then. Interesting how that happens"
Me = "I don't know what I was saying".

So. Back to the veil of mist that hangs around my head but different from the grey patches and zooming I wrote about the other day. Another form of dissociation though perhaps?

Another thing.
2. My therapist madea comment today about the fact that I am very prone to quite upsetting psychosomatic responses, that is, my body "feels" in a way that my soul (or whatever it is tht feels) can't.
As soon as she makes an observation about me I am near drowned by a mighty wave of complete fear that she doesn't believe a word of what I am saying.
It's totally irrational and I cannot for the life of me figure how the wave forms or where it comes from, but it is so powerful and so frightening that it chokes me nd makes it impossible to speak.

Last one,
3. Every session when I tell her something about an experience or feeling and she goes to feed something back to me, I brace myself for a disgusted sweep of hand. I sit and feel my insides twist as I wait for her to start telling me to get a life. To tell me that none of it matters.
I wait for her to tell me that she can't be bothered and I am a waste of time.

Every session I walk out and drive away wondering how I got away with it for another day.

Blurring The Edges - The Mind Thing

The mind thing.

That's what I called it before I heard the terms 'fragmentation' or 'dissociation'.

For a long time I have been aware of the mind thing. It happens sometimes when my anxiety levels get really high begin to tip over into panic. Sadly, it doesn't hang around when a full blown panic attack strikes. Instead it usually appears at the most inconvenient time, usually when I am in a situation where I am engaged in conversation with someone and cannot possibly indicate that there is anything even slightly wrong.

Picture me, driving up a dual carriageway, with one of our more 'interesting' students in my car (minbus overflow - educational trip - kid not to be trusted in large groups).
Of course I have been stressed. ALL trips out raise my (normally too-moderate-to-be-comfortable) anxiety levels, but it's not as if I am panicking or anything... At least, I don't think so, until the zooming begins and the swooping darkness and the sense of that I am losing my grip on reality. It is as though my mind has suddenly begun to push against itself to create a little dented fontanelle, space enough to fold inwards.
I am battling the growing sense of what I can only describe as 'being corridored'. My mind is becoming a breath stealingly narrow passage lit by low energy bulbs which won't warm up.
And all the time, the disaffected student is talking and I am trying to focus on the words and respond at the same time as forcing my eyes to blink hard and believe that the road and traffic ahead is actually real. It is not a computer game. I am 'in' this.
My steering wheel feels part of my hands and when we arrive, I fall into the disquieted aftermath.

The warning often precedes a panic attack which doesn't always come, but if it does, can be a sweeping tornado which wreaks havoc on my inner landscape.
Panic attacks are really a post all of their own but I give them some mention here because, although not always, they are often linked to 'the mind thing'.

Another of the strangest and most disturbing things that I experience when I am zoning out is that the person who I am trying to focus on ("act normal for goodness sakes, act normal!") begins to blur around the edges and then, as though I have starred at the sun for a long time and looked away, the grey patches appear and start to swim around them and over them.
Disorientating to say the least. To say more would be to describe the nausea and the dizziness that swells and washes in crested waves through my head and gut.
I'll leave it there for fear of drowning!

The mind thing happened in therapy. It often does to some extent.
Last session she zoomed in and out and was almost overwhelmed by the monsterous steel grey amoebic blobs which looked as though they were trying to blot her out completely.
Today I knew when it was going to start because the volume went down and I hardly dared look at her. When she asked if she was zooming in and out I explained that she was blurry, as though looking at a photo taken with a soft focus lens. She thought that my mind needed to blur her. It's a protection thing. Psychobabble?
I'm not sure.

I would be interested to know if anyone else experiences this, fragmenting of their mind when they try to talk or anything similar.